Chasselas

Chasselas is the most planted white grape in Switzerland and one of the least aromatic wine grapes in commercial use — a combination that sounds like a criticism and is, to the Swiss, the entire point. It is grown as a table grape elsewhere in Europe, which tells you something about how gentle it is.

The argument for it is transparency. Chasselas has almost no varietal flavour of its own: low acidity, no discernible aromatic signature, moderate alcohol. What it does instead is take on the character of the ground it grows in, which makes it the closest thing white wine has to a neutral measuring instrument. The same producer working two neighbouring parcels in Lavaux will make two recognisably different wines from it, and the Swiss take those differences extremely seriously.

In the Vaud, on the terraced vineyards above Lake Geneva, it gives a wine of quiet weight and a faintly smoky, flinty character, sometimes with a light natural prickle left from fermentation. In the Valais, where it is called Fendant, warmer conditions and alpine soils produce something rounder and more mineral. In Germany's Markgräflerland it is Gutedel and makes a light, soft, easy white.

It is usually drunk young and cold, traditionally with fondue or raclette, where its lack of assertiveness and low acidity work better than a sharper wine would. A handful of producers age it, and older Chasselas develops a honeyed, nutty depth that surprises people who have written it off.

Very little is exported. The Swiss drink almost all of it themselves, which is the usual explanation for why it is so rarely encountered.